An American sculptor's departure into protest

By J. Nicole Long

During the rise of fascism in Europe and the first
stirrings of World War II, American sculptor David Smith
crafted a series of brass medals never intended to adorn
soldiers' uniforms. He made medals of dishonor.

On display at the Boston University Art Gallery until
February 28, David Smith: Medals for Dishonor includes pages
from his sketch books, studies, paintings, and preliminary
casts. Smith kept extensive files and based his images on
photographs and texts from newspaper and magazine clippings.
His explicit compositions evoke disgust for the human
capacity for war, racism, power and exploitation, and
demonstrate the artist's profound sympathy for their
victims. He was not optimistic that the exploitation and
violence he depicted would disappear, but he hoped his
medals, created between 1936 and 1943, would raise
consciousness and serve as agents of social change.

Smith, born in Decatur, Ind., in 1906, moved in 1926 to
New York, where he befriended artists disenchanted with what
seemed to them the static and provincial nature of American
art. In a 1996 essay titled "David Smith in Protest," art
critic Dore Ashton writes about the late 1930s, "Almost the
entire public press was patriotically incensed by the
paintings and sculptures occasionally exhibited in America
by the pioneers of modernism, among them Matisse, Picasso,
and Brancusi. In the face of such opposition, young
experimental artists such as Smith saw modernism as a
cause."

Black Legion -- Klan -- Bund -- fordstream
of
Americanism. From the pulpit the noose hangs --
their christ was not a jew.

Hoods are on the horizon. The tree has roots and
bore
fruit for vultures. The sacred cow with
pumphandle
tail rides high on the moon.

Liberty and classic too: Women are caught in the
act
in the house of girdles, or tethered in bushes with
a
sack over the head, or peep from behind the flag
still
carrying the nation hatchet -- the hounds lick and
smell.

The superamerican rises from the pit of
mediaevalism
and by the grace of modern industrialism is
aiming
directly at you.

--David Smith

Three years after Smith arrived in New York, the Great
Depression devastated the world. After Franklin Delano
Roosevelt's election as president in 1932, he quickly took
relief measures, such as establishing the federally financed
Works Progress Administration, one of whose branches was an
artists' project. The project favored social realism and
faced artists with many conflicting demands. Smith was a
minority among WPA artists when he chose to defend
modernism, "fighting both against political conservatism (as
leftists, which many of their antagonists among the realists
were also) and against aesthetic conservatism (as radical
experimentalists in the abstract mode)," writes Ashton.

While continuing to create abstract welded sculpture,
Smith's undertaking of the medals project marked an
aesthetic shift from the formative work of the 1930s to
deeply personal work in the 1940s.

The medals, sometimes referred to as plaques, vary in
shape and size, ranging between 7 1/2 and 14 1/8 inches. To
illustrate the 15 societal ills that he saw confronting
humankind in the late 1930s -- with titles such as Elements
Which Cause Prostitution, Scientific Body Disposal, and
Diplomats: Fascist and Fascist Tending -- Smith departed
from the abstract for which he was known and used literal
images for the medals, among them the human figure, cannons,
and industrial cranes. Smith's medals, refined after casting
with jeweler's tools and a dentist's drill, convey his
outrage for the suffering inflicted by war and indict those
who seek to gain power by waging it.

The exhibition is a rare opportunity to see work from
Smith's brief departure from abstraction. The images are raw
and disturbing. The female figure is often portrayed coupled
with a cannon that is clearly a phallus. Sometimes the
figure is a rape victim, sometimes a prostitute. The
composition of the medals suggests the surreal, hectic
nature of a circus while illustrating the dehumanization of
war. Diplomats: Fascist and Fascist Tending has a two-faced
politician, and a muscular male figure that seems to impale
a female on a phallic pole. The female appears
simultaneously to be a corpse and an acrobat, and just
beneath her is a seal balancing a ball on its nose. Smith
wrote poemlike texts to accompany the medals and further
refine his intentions. For Diplomats: Fascist and Fascist
Tending he wrote, "There is danger that the muscleman may
have his achillean heel nipped by the gila. The deadliest
guns are not in the field but in the chancelleries!"

By the time Smith's medals were ready to be shown,
however, the political climate had radically changed, and
his protest and commentary appeared naive. Consequently, his
medals were not as acclaimed as his other work.
Fundamentally a socialist, Smith had ruthlessly criticized
capitalism, but then felt the American government should
intercede against Hitler. "He, and many of his colleagues,"
Ashton writes, "had become convinced that America's
intervention was necessary by then." Although his perception
of the war changed, the medals are a testament to the
penetrating conflict Smith experienced as its witness.

The exhibition and all gallery events are free and open
to the public. For more information, call 617-353-3329.